


While they do dream things true

by orphan_account



Category: October Daye Series - Seanan McGuire
Genre: Dreams, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 05:37:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8878003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: While the Luidaeg watches over her, Toby heals and dreams.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [acquiredsight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/acquiredsight/gifts).



My beautiful niece, my beautiful, idiotic, death-loving, reckless fool of a niece was lying broken in her temporary bed at the Court in the Mists and I was pacing. We had found her body shattered at the bottom of a tower from which she had apparently thrown herself. Jin had been piecing her bones back together for hours. While the pin-up pixie did that work, I set about bloodletting myself.

Toby is near indestructible, but she’s been getting closer and closer to total self-destruction in the past few years, and I couldn’t have that. First of all, I’m not done with her yet; but more importantly: I really do love her.

I’d like to say that I’d never tell her, or that she already knows--both of which are true, on their face. But the fact is, she’ll know for certain now that she’ll be drinking my blood through the rest of her convalescence. I tried to fix my mind on something other than the times I interfered in her childhood, the fights I had with her mother over the damage Amy was doing to that poor girl...instead my mind wandered to another life I had interfered with--one closely tied to Toby’s. One just as undermined by a self-centered parent.

Toby is as close to death as she has ever been. Her kitty-cat may be even closer. The very least I can do to repay her for saving me is to soothe her sleep with my memories of her love. I let my mind wander to the times I knew Tybalt, and Rand before that. It would serve to protect my memories of the things she cannot yet know while also pleasing her, I hoped.

I watched Jin pour my blood into Toby’s slack mouth. I kept pacing.

***

I’m dreaming. I know I’m dreaming, because everything I see has that haze around the edge of it, and there are no transitions from this happening to the next. I hurt. Do I hurt? My dreaming body appears whole, but my waking mind feels thoroughly broken.

One moment I hear my mother’s voice cry out: “You had no right!” And then I hear the Luidaeg respond. “I had every right, Amy. And every responsibility.” But even as I hear these words and realize they come from my own mouth, they begin to fade away and the dream moves on.

Now I am standing in the street. It is clearly not a San Francisco street, and definitely not this century either. I look down and see boots and breeches, and leather gloves on my hands. I scan the road, looking for...what? In my own mind, which is not my mind, I think, “He should be here, any moment.”

I realize that I am riding the blood in my dreams. This has never happened before. Am I dreaming that I’m riding the Luidaeg’s blood, or am I riding a dreaming Luidaeg’s blood? I can’t tell in this moment.

I am jerked out of my reverie by the sudden appearance of a small boy. The Luidaeg’s attention is suddenly all on him. He is unconscious, lying by the side of the road, shivering in his sleep. He looks touched by frost.

She weaves a spell, cloaking the child. He is clearly fae, a Cait Sidhe kitten, tabby stripes marked in his brown hair, the scent of his magic...

The scent of his magic is pennyroyal and musk. I gasp, just as I make sense of the Luidaeg’s conscious thoughts. “He will be safe now. As safe as he can be from that cruel man he calls father. For the time being, at least.”

I want to touch him, warm up the small bones frozen from a premature trip through the Shadow Roads and whisper it will be all right. But the dream is already changing again, and I am torn away from the kitten my fiance once was.

***

The dream solidifies again. I am still in London--I know it’s London now, because I know that Luidaeg has given me the gift of her memories of Tybalt while I sleep. I am lucid enough in the dream, and in the blood to remember falling out of the tower window with Minna and Verona, the ground speeding up at me while I fell. I must be healing with the aid of Luidaeg’s blood, just as she once healed with mine and my magic. As soon as I woke, I would have work to do. While I slept, I might as well enjoy the show.

I see Tybalt again, awake this time. The Luidaeg is watching him creep about a market in cat form, slinking up against the legs of meat and cheese purveyors, begging for scraps. He looks as young as Raj when I first met him in Blind Michael’s lands. The Luidaeg tracks him until he struts behind a bush and transforms, creeping out to walk along the street munching his lunch as a boy of 12 or 13. 

I can hear Luidaeg’s concern buzzing in her mind as she walks up to the boy. “You’re lucky no one but me saw you do that,” she says as she catches up to him. He startles like a cat finding an unexpected cucumber and blinks at her. Growls. She chuckles and ruffles his hair. “Settle down, kitty-boy. I’m not going to hurt you. But I think I can help.”

Young Rand--because I can see, in this moment, the difference between my Tybalt, King of Cats, and this young stripling, prince of nothing--Rand cocks his eyebrows at her. Tybalt has never spoken much about his father, other than to admit to killing him along the Shadow Roads, centuries before he ever met me. The Luidaeg, in her thoughts, reveals to me the depth of his father’s abuse. He keeps a useless prince in his court to follow the letter of the law, but refuses to train him in any skills he needs to survive or rule. If any Prince of Cats begins to threaten his authority, he kills him and his sisters and begins again. Rand has no skills, no kingdom, and only his sisters for friends--and they are a ransom against his good behavior. He is a kitten in a trap, and he snarls, cornered.

The Luidaeg winks at him, keeping her distance from the angry kitty. “I hear the Duke’s Theatre is in need of a rat-catcher, and a theatre with its stage, rigging, rafters, and hidey-holes would be a fantastic place for a young Prince of Cats to find his way, don’t you think?” His face shifts to wonder, and he looks away for an instant, towards the direction of the theatre I suppose, and in that instant the Luidaeg disappears from his view. “That should do the trick,” she thinks, as preteen Rand and the rest of London fade from view.

***

I barely have time to process any of this as the Luidaeg’s blood still contains so much more, and more memories of encounters with Tybalt than I had ever imagined. I sense that there is more to learn, and more the Luidaeg would like to give me, but at the same time I cannot stay asleep. The Conclave is not over, Tybalt could be dying, and I need to see High King Sollys.

I begin to fight to wake. I feel the power of the Luidaeg’s blood strengthen me, soothe me, and I let it flow over and through me. Tybalt might be dying, my body might be permanently broken, but the Luidaeg will always be there for me, of that I have no doubt.

Apparently she’s been there for me in ways that extend to my family, and backwards in time. She and I are going to have to have a talk about that when I finally wake up.

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea for a story about the intersections of Tybalt's life with the Luidaeg's originally because I wanted her to drop in on him while he was still a theater cat. After re-reading "The Ratcatcher" (available here: http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/rat-catcher/) and "Forbid the Sea" (available here: http://seananmcguire.com/tobyshorts.php), I found other great points at which the Luidaeg might have shown up and steered his life, in the same way she had steered Toby's by forcing the issue of her Changeling's Choice. But my recipient wanted Toby/Luidaeg, and I wanted to give that to them! So I thought on it a while, and came up with this nested story that fits in at the end of _Once Broken Faith_, while Toby is healing from the worst injuries she's ever known with the help of the Luidaeg's blood. I don't know if riding the blood in dreams is a thing that would actually happen in Seanan's canon, but it seemed to me to work very well. I hope you liked it!


End file.
